


heart stopper

by archons



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Animal Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Medical Trauma, Mental Health Issues, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 18:09:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5301578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archons/pseuds/archons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every abandoned camp in the Commonwealth looks the same, but no two hold the same risk or promise. After approaching one such camp and dealing with the ensuing fight, Miles and Danse are faced with patching each other up. Neither of them take it very well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart stopper

**Author's Note:**

> This one was prompted by a few people over on Tumblr. The prompt was from a non-sexual intimacy list and was "patching up a wound," but it got a little bit out of hand. These two tend to do that to me.
> 
> As for the "animal death" tag, I don't mean Dogmeat! I repeat, Dogmeat DOES NOT DIE in this fic. It's one of the raider dogs. I just wanted to tag it to be extra careful.

It was barely morning when Miles and Danse approached the seemingly abandoned camp. Fog sat over the settlement, dense and near-blinding, and in the direction they came, a storm turned the sky from white-gray to black. Weather. Miles hated weather.

He sucked in a slow breath and held it as he took a step forward. Dew softened to fall of his boot, sliding rather than crunching. He was glad for that, at least.

Every dilapidated lean-to in the Commonwealth looked the same when cast in foggy gray. Had they ever been through there? At a distance, neither of them could see splatters of dried blood or shards of bone and withered brain from a shotgun's spray. But that didn't mean they weren't there.

Paranoia drove Miles to carefulness. Cradling his rifle in his arms, his eyes flicked between the establishment's two small rooms. The ladder leading up to them lay in the leaves, and the window frames were empty and dark. Dead or asleep... or alive and waiting for some caravan to pass through, eager to die.

Beside him, Danse's face skewed in concentration. Timing your movements to match the roll of distant thunder wasn't easy on bare feet, much less full power armor. It was by his word that they were even attempting stealth, a stratagem he was likely regretting by now. 

They were close enough for a whisper.

Miles was willing to chance it.

“I think I remember this place,” he told him, his voice low enough to be lost to the wind. “A couple of weeks ago. Supermutants, right?”

“The furnishings suggest otherwise.”

Taking another look at the camp, Miles realized what he meant. The lack of dismembered human bodies was enough to mark it as  _ not  _ belonging to supermutants. No hanging sacks of gore. No piles of limbs or lakes of congealed blood. So not mutants.

“... Raiders? We've killed lots of raiders.”

Danse nodded. “There is a chance that this camp could belong to peaceful settlers.”

“Remind me. Next time we help out a settlement, we should paint a huge fucking smiley face on all four sides in case this ever happens again.”

He got no response from the paladin at his side. Danse's mouth thinned into a frustrated line, and Miles bit back a laugh before biting back a sigh. “I'm just saying that it'd be helpful.”

“Until raiders learned your symbol and began painting it on their buildings.”

Miles's brows shot up. He smiled, too, though it was hidden beneath the flannel scarf he'd tied around his neck. 

Danse was right because of course he was. Miles hated that exhaustion loosened his tongue, but he couldn't censor himself in such a sorry state. Walking through the night, constantly on edge, waiting for ferals to descend from the heavens... it wasn't a good time, and it wasn't the state of mind anyone could rest in.

A bolt of lightning brightened the sky around them, causing the shadows to flicker menacingly beneath the raised camp. Miles took a step forward.

What he heard was the roll of thunder. What Danse heard was...

“Mine!”

Miles stumbled backwards, just far enough for Danse to fit between him and the frag mine half-buried in the fallen leaves. The explosion lit the forest in a way lightning couldn't match—in shades of orange and red. Danse fell forward, pushed to his knees from the blast. From his place on the wet ground, boxed in beneath the broad frame of the paladin's power armor, Miles saw pain in his features, clear as day.

And just as soon as the fire went from a wall of red to a flicker, the empty windows filled with guns and the hungry painted faces of raiders. 

With no time to recover from the detonation, Danse righted himself and turned around as quickly as he could manage in his power armor before rushing forward. Another crash rang out among the shouts and bullets, and the flare of light that followed illuminated Danse's back. 

Blood stood out, slick and black, against the gray metal of his suit. 

Miles felt his heart throb painfully in his chest. From fear, from anger, from worry—he felt each of them, one after the other, and they left his head clearer than before. After giving himself a single moment to breathe before following in Danse's wake, he took advantage of that clarity and thumbed over his rifle's safety before hefting it up.

The weight of the gun forced an ache into his biceps. He took the time to get a feel for the gun's slow drift downward before he tightened his muscles, narrowed an eye, and curled his forefinger around the trigger.

One of the guns in the window fell onto the ground as the man holding it was blasted back from a rifle shot to the mouth. The kickback of his weapon shoved Miles back a step, heel digging into the leaves and the mud. 

Letting his rifle fall, kept close to his body by the strap he wore, Miles reached into his pack. Past the ammo, past the food, his fingertips brushed over what he wanted. “Danse!” he called out as he drew the grenade from his belongings. “Danse, I swear to God...!”

Once he knew he had Danse's attention, he tossed the grenade in his direction. Even if he dropped it, they would be fine. But if he didn't, this would be over more quickly.

While luck wasn't on their side one hundred percent, Danse caught the grenade in his off-hand. He loosed the pin and threw it aside before hurling it in through the empty window frame. Among the raiders' rallying cries, the barking of attack dogs, and the reloading weapons, they heard the grenade thunk against the wooden wall of the cabin.

One of the hounds leapt from the building and hit the ground running. Miles reached for his rifle, but the dog was too close to get a proper shot. It snarled at him, drool flicking from its jowls and powerful jaws snapping. And when it jumped, it forced every ounce of its muscular body into his.

Air shot from Miles's lungs when he hit the ground, and he gasped for more as the dog sunk its teeth into his forearm, ripping through fabric and puncturing flesh. It shook its broad head, set as much on destruction as its next meal, and Miles cried out, squirming and kicking at the dog to try to get it off and away from him.

Another explosion tore through the fog, this time coupled with the splintering of wood and screaming. Chunks of the building flew in every direction. The floor fell downward, along with a few limp and burning bodies. Some were blown back, bloody and already dead. Others still lived, crawling through the burning wreckage on shattered or absent limbs.

Danse finished them off as Miles wrestled against the dog, using the surprise from the explosion to shift his weight on top of it rather than beneath it. Grabbing for his rifle with his left hand, he curled the right into a fist and jammed the muzzle of the gun against the dog's body. The first bullet wasn't enough to get his forearm free, but the second was.

Pushing himself up onto his feet with one hand, the other arm cradled against his body, he turned towards the camp.

Small fires flickered among the mess of planks and beams. Danse kicked over the scorched mattress pinning one of the raiders down and executed her with a blow to the back of the head. Miles opened his mouth to warn him as one of the few remaining raiders lifted a pipe pistol in his half-mangled hand, but before he could say anything, the man shoved the end into his own mouth.

Cringing away from the sight, Miles rubbed his palm over his ringing ear and moved  _ away  _ rather than towards—away from the cabin, away from the raiders and the dogs and the mines. 

He sat down at the foot of a tree and pulled his pack around to rest between his legs. A stimpak wouldn't heal the bite entirely, but coupled with a shot of Med-X, it would be enough to make him useful again.

Before the war, Miles hated needles. He hated the idea of injecting himself with  _ anything _ . But you can't hate what's necessary to survive, not in the Commonwealth. So he shrugged off his jacket and reached for the stimpak, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth as he slid the sharp tip of the syringe beside the ruined skin and torn muscle on his right forearm. Bandages came next, and he wrapped them up tight.

Glancing towards the raider's camp to make sure Danse was still preoccupied, Miles found the single injection of Med-X he had in his pack and thumbed off the cover. His skin seemed to part for the needle, welcoming the drug into his veins like some kind of bad news lover, and the feeling of relief that rushed over him was almost euphoric.

Miles dropped the syringe onto the ground before covering it with dead leaves and resting against the trunk of the tree as Danse made his way over to him. Limping wasn't possible in power armor, but he was slower than usual and slowing down more and more with every step.

Still, when Danse was close enough to be heard over the approaching storm, he was all business. Bleeding, but all business. “Good thinking with the grenade.” He looked down at him, checking the bandage and the blood on the leaves and the collected look on Miles's face with a critical eye. “But you need to be more careful.”

“Get out of your power armor,” Miles groaned, rubbing a hand through his sweaty hair and pulling himself up onto his feet. The  _ shut up  _ was unspoken, but heavily implied. “And your uniform. We need to get the shrapnel out.”

Danse did as he was told. His power armor opened from the back to reveal the extent of the damage. The backs of his thighs were saturated with blood, but he was still standing and that told Miles enough for him to be grateful.

“At least it didn't hit anything important.”

“Muscle is important, soldier.” Danse stepped out of the power armor, and Miles saw him wince the moment his feet touched the uneven ground. He braced himself on the arms of the suit rather than trusting himself completely. “But shielding a scribe in a traveling uniform is more important than saving myself the pain.”

Miles picked up his pack before going over to him. He waited for a moment before opening his mouth again, distracted more by the warmth running through his veins than the view of Danse's broad back and cinched waist. Pulling himself back into the right state of mind, he cleared his throat. “Do you need help with the uniform?”

“No.”

He knew better than to question him. Instead, he set the pack down and knelt in front of it to rifled through its contents. Miles made a small circle of necessary equipment—a bottle of purified water, a pair of pliers and tweezers from the Prydwen, bandages. He considered reaching for the blood pack, but hesitated. He knew the basics, but giving Danse blood was a little beyond him. Waiting until they were back in Sanctuary and letting Curie see to him would be a better option. A wiser option.

Once he was satisfied with his spread, Miles looked up at Danse to see that no progress had been made with the uniform. The man stood there, back tense, fingers curled so tightly around the frame of his armor that the skin of his knuckles paled to white.

“You need help.”

Danse's silence was enough of an answer to pull Miles onto his feet again. When he spoke again, he deepened his voice to mimic Danse's usual tone. “Pride should never keep you from accepting the help you require, soldier.”

Of course, like before, Danse didn't find that very amusing.

Moving over to him, Miles took another knee and began unlacing his boots. He should've known to help Danse with them, considering the amount of pain that would've come with bending down. “Lift your leg,” he murmured, words soft rather than deep. His voice was his own again, and Danse relaxed enough to nod. 

Resting one hand behind his knee, Miles helped guide one leg up and removed the boot with his other hand. They repeated the process on the other side, and once he was free of his boots, Danse was able to focus on removing the rest of his uniform.

While he did that, Miles reached for the bottle of water and unscrewed the cap. Every sharp inhale from Danse drew his attention, making him just as jumpy as he was eager to help. Doing something wrong at this juncture would have been an unforgivable sort of mistake. Danse might have forgiven him; the Brotherhood might have forgiven him. He just wouldn't have forgiven himself.

Keeping that thought near at hand, Miles walked the few feet over to Danse on his knees. The paladin stood there, sweating and pale and streaked with red. His breathing was shallow, fingers trembling from the exertion. 

Shrapnel wounds were never fun. Few battlefield wounds were, but shrapnel wounds were the bloodiest and the messiest he'd seen overseas. Those were the ones that gave him nightmares.

Washing away the blood was a task in and of itself. He poured the purified water over the backs of Danse's thighs and carefully wiped away the excess, revealing entrance wounds and cooling the pieces of shrapnel enough to remove them with the pliers. There were fewer than he expected. Most of the shards were caught in his power armor. Ingram would remove those without any trouble. The rest were for him.

“This'll be  _ easy _ .” Miles attempted a laugh, but the sound was too awkward and shaky to comfort anyone, much less himself. 

Danse spoke through a clenched jaw. “Please don't make light of this.”

Setting the bottle of water down, Miles bundled the spare bandages up to wipe the blood away upon removal of the shrapnel. Then he reached for the pliers, eager to get started... and to finish. “I make two jokes and suddenly I'm incompetent.” 

“I don't think you're incompetent, Paxton.” He let out a hard breath and curled his hands around the back of his power armor, muscles in his arms twitching. “I just don't appreciate levity when I'm physically compromised. Not with a storm on our heels.”

Miles glanced in the direction they'd come. Half of the sky was growing darker and darker while the other half brightened to the pale blue of mid-morning. 

He pressed his lips together and made a thoughtful noise before testing the tension in the pliers he held in his hand. “At least it isn't a rad storm.”

“Miles...”

That got his attention. Miles turned back to Danse with a nod. “Sorry, I'm... delaying. Avoiding this. I've never done it myself.” He squeezed the pliers again. The tool made a small metallic sound. “I've  _ seen  _ it done, during the war, but I've never been the one doing the pulling and the stitching.”

“Scribe!”

“Fuck.” Miles exhaled slowly before taking in a deep breath to steady his hands. “Fuck, Danse, I'm sorry.”

“It's understandable.” Danse did his best to glance back at him. He barely caught his eyes before the pain that followed movement forced him back around. “Just... hurry.”

With the bandages ready, Miles found the first piece of shrapnel with the pliers. The metal stuck from the flesh of his thigh just enough to grab for it. As he shifted the shard around, blood seeped from the wound and threatened to drip down the back of his leg. Rather than letting that happen, Miles wiped up the thick trail of blood with the bandage and bit down hard on his bottom lip.

Danse did his best to keep a straight face, to remain strong, but every shift and tug of the shrapnel in his leg hurt worse. 

In their months of traveling together, Miles had never seen Danse in this state. His injuries weren't few or far between, but they were minor compared to the ones he suffered due to his sorry excuse for armor. His forearm pulsed faintly with every movement of the pliers, a faint reminder that he hadn't come out of this confrontation unscathed, either.

Once the shard was free, Miles applied pressure to the gash. At least the first was small enough to not require stitches. He wouldn't be as lucky with some of the others. But the first, he'd managed, and that allowed him a few easy breaths before he moved on.

One by one, Miles tended to Danse's wounds. He applied pressure to them, washed them, bandaged them. The rain started as he pulled one particularly large metal shard free, but even that didn't keep Miles from stitching the gash shut. Curie would have her hands full once they got back to Sanctuary. 

Lightning sliced through the growing darkness around them, startling a roll of bandages right out of Miles's hands. He couldn't tell time by the sky, but the Med-X was beginning to wear off. They'd been at this for too long. His stalling left them soaked to the skin. Danse's wounds were at risk of being infected. 

Self-hatred bubbled uneasily in his stomach.

“How...” Danse shuddered, half from the pain and half from the chill of the early December rain. “Ah, how many left?”

“I don't know.” Miles looked over his legs, over the quickly bruising skin, irritated and red. Nearly every inch of them was poorly bandaged, from his upper thighs to midway down his calves. “I think I might be done.”

Miles sat back onto his heels, fingers curling into loose fists where they rested against his thighs. “You need to get back to the Prydwen,” he murmured. “They can't help you with this at Sanctuary. You need x-rays. I have no idea how many I missed.”

Danse shifted on his feet at that. He let go of his power armor and turned towards Miles, pale-cheeked but grateful. At least, there was a light of gratefulness there among the pain. When he spoke, his voice was soft. Hoarse, but soft. “You did what you could, soldier.”

“Yeah, sure.” Miles gave a disbelieving laugh before returning his instruments back to the pack. “If you don't end up dead from sepsis, you'll probably get hypothermia. Go, team.”

“Paxton.”

Miles set his jaw. “Danse.”

“I'm trying to thank you,” he said with an edge of desperation. Somewhere between the exhaustion and the blood loss, he'd likely gotten tired of dealing with him. “You did what I wouldn't have been capable of. If not for you being here, I  _ would  _ have died.”

Miles stood, lifting the pack with his good arm. “You wouldn't have set off a landmine.”

“No, but...”

“You wouldn't have gotten tackled by a fucking dog.”

Danse's brows pinched inwards. “That isn't—that isn't  _ important _ . What's important is that you thought on your feet. You helped me, and you helped yourself. You did well.”

Miles hated  _ thank you _ s. 

“I did all I could,” he said, refusing to meet his eyes. “I wouldn't say I did anything well.”

A broad hand found the thin curve of his cheek, stopping him from moving away. He had no chance but to look at Danse then, standing so near to him, face held in his hand. Their eyes met. “You haven't been part of the Brotherhood for long enough to receive the same amount of training.”

Miles's eyes dipped to Danse's mouth, hovering there for the shortest of moments before they drifted upwards again.

“This isn't the first time I've dealt with shrapnel wounds. You reacted calmly and in a professional matter. Elder Maxson will be impressed by my report.”

“Are you going to tell him I tripped the landmine?”

Danse seemed surprised by the question. “Of course I will.”

Miles gave a bitter chuckle. “He won't be impressed.”

“He will be.” 

The firm tone to Danse's voice kept Miles from protesting, but the conflicted look in his eyes didn't go away. Nothing could make that look disappear. 

“Help me back into my uniform,” Danse continued, more softly. “We're only a couple of hours out of Sanctuary.”

“Will you make it?”

Danse chuckled. “With luck? Yes.”

Miles opened his mouth again, but Danse spoke before he could say a word. “Even without it.”

Getting Danse back into his uniform was difficult with his legs bandaged so tightly, but after no small amount of struggling, he was clothed again, right down to his boots. And when he returned to his power armor, walking was simpler. Given the grunts from each of his initial steps, the pain was still there, still sharp enough to make a hardened soldier whine, but simpler.

They walked together in silence, keeping to the main road to avoid more raiders. The storm was more thunder and lightning than rain, but every time Miles glanced at his pipboy, the screen blurred. He wiped the drops away as best he could, but there was no use, not in the middle of a storm.

He was glad for the rain, chill aside, because a charming man could pass his exhausted, worried tears off as weather. Weather, and nothing more.

 

 


End file.
